How Veganism Helps Humanity

Adopting and advocating a vegan lifestyle is one of the most effective ways you can help our species.

Vegans are accused of being misanthropic so often that it’s practically part of the lifestyle. By caring about animals, one inadvertently volunteers to be criticized for failing to care sufficiently about humans. Of course, these critiques aren’t particularly well-grounded: Animal rights proponents are more likely than others to advocate for human rights, vegans score higher on EQ assessments than non-vegans, and brain fMRI research has shown that vegans have stronger neural empathy responses than meat-eaters when presented with images of human suffering. By every available measure, vegans care more about humans than omnivores do.

However, this data misses a far more significant issue with assuming vegans are misanthropes: Going vegan, and persuading others to do the same, is good for humanity. Vegans profoundly reduce human suffering and give our species a better chance to flourish. As strange as it might sound, one can give other animals zero moral consideration and still go vegan for ethical reasons. So long as one possesses some shred of concern for the human species, adopting and advocating a vegan lifestyle is simply the right thing to do.

To many people reading, especially omnivores, this proposition will sound completely ridiculous. After all, why would someone focused exclusively on the interests of humans want to move towards a vegan world? It might seem counter-intuitive, but it turns out there are many reasons why veganism and humanism go hand-in-hand.

The first reason humanists should want to move towards a vegan world is so that we can sustainably feed our growing population. Most humanitarians would want to prioritize feeding hungry people over feeding farm animals. And yet, under our current agricultural system, we are doing just the opposite: According to the UN, 815 million people are currently suffering from chronic undernourishment. Meanwhile, Cornell University estimates that the US could feed approximately 800 million people with the grain we now feed to our livestock. In other words, Americans could end world hunger today if we began feeding hungry people instead of farm animals. It isn’t all-or-nothing, either: According to world hunger expert Dr. Jean Mayer, even if only 10% of Americans went vegan, we would be able to feed 60 million people with the savings.

A shift towards veganism gives us the opportunity to feed the world in a manner that is both efficient and sustainable, using the resources we already have. How can we waste food on fattening cows for slaughter when people are starving all over the globe?

If we look beyond America, the numbers only get more substantial. According to a recent article in Nature, we could feed 10 billion people sustainably if more individuals adopted a plant-based diet. Under our current omnivorous system, we can’t even supply 7 billion people with food, and it’s nothing close to sustainable. It takes 100 calories worth of wheat to produce just three calories of beef — clearly, the inefficiency of animal agriculture stands in direct conflict with the goal of sustainably feeding the planet. A shift towards veganism gives us the opportunity to feed the world in a manner that is both efficient and sustainable, using the resources we already have. How can we waste food on fattening cows for slaughter when people are starving all over the globe?

Fighting hunger through efficient consumption is only one of many little-known humanitarian arguments for veganism. One of the most important of these is, unfortunately, the least talked about: the impending superbug crisis. Experts estimate that by 2050, strains of antimicrobial-resistant microorganisms (commonly called superbugs) will account for 10 million deaths annually. Let’s put that number into perspective: You could combine annual deaths from traffic accidents, diabetes, measles, tetanus, and cholera, and you would not even get close to that number. You could also add gun deaths to your total, and you still wouldn’t approach anywhere near 10 million. A world without functional antimicrobials is a world where every minor cut could become deadly. If we don’t do everything we can to avoid this tragedy, history will never forgive us.

Animal agriculture is one of the leading manufacturers of this coming disaster. Farmers like to mix antibiotics into their animals’ food and water because it reduces livestock losses and promotes rapid growth. This practice has become so extreme that farms now use more antibiotics than hospitals: In the US, 70% of antibiotics are wasted on farm animals. One hundred separate studies have now shown a link between animal antibiotic consumption and antibiotic resistance. Our addiction to animal products has turned farms into superbug factories.

Livestock gave us tuberculosis, anthrax, tapeworms, E. coli, MRSA, salmonella, mad cow, avian flu, swine flu, and many other catastrophic diseases.

Not only does animal agriculture take down our defenses against epidemics, but it also creates new ones. 60% of all human diseases come from animals, and the vast majority of those are from farm animals. Livestock gave us tuberculosis, anthrax, tapeworms, E. coli, MRSA, salmonella, mad cow, avian flu, swine flu, and many other catastrophic diseases. Even HIV/AIDS was given to us by meat consumption: It originated from humans hunting and eating primates. In a vegan world, humanity wouldn’t have endured any of these calamities — all the death and misery they caused would have been avoided. Every time we purchase animal products, we roll the dice on the next pandemic; every time we abstain, we mitigate risk.

We need not look to the future to see the harm animal products do to humanity. Animal agriculture is currently fueling the displacement of indigenous people worldwide. Because of its excessive land requirements, animal agriculture has long incentivized colonialism: Historian Virginia DeJohn Anderson wrote an entire book on this subject, chronicling the intersection between land-theft and animal products in America. In her work, Creatures of Empire, she argues that the desire to feed farm animals motivated colonists to move west, appropriating native land as they went. In her view, much of our colonial history is directly traceable to our eating habits.

This history is repeating itself in South America, where ranchers are currently burning down the rainforests so they can raise cattle and grow soy for livestock. The Amazon is home to 160 distinct societies that speak 195 different languages — in some cases, these communities have lived sustainably for thousands of years. Today, their home is burning, and 91% of the destruction is directly attributable to animal agriculture. Brazil is the world’s top beef exporter, and their soy feeds livestock worldwide, so it’s almost impossible to disentangle oneself from this atrocity without going vegan. By buying their beef — or buying dead animals fed with their soy — we are stealing land from indigenous people and giving it to domestic animals. How can we claim to care about humans, if we needlessly sponsor such theft?

Our inefficient system of global agriculture is quietly prompting similar displacement events worldwide. By going vegan, and increasing the land-efficiency of your diet, you dramatically reduce your contribution to this issue. Unfortunately, there are many other causes of indigenous displacement, and it is almost impossible to disentangle oneself from this problem completely. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and going vegan is a decent place to start.

All of the points I have mentioned combine to make a robust cumulative case for humanistic veganism. But when I bring up these anthropocentric arguments, omnivores often respond with cynical counter-arguments about how plants are harvested using exploited workers. Ironically, this is yet another reason to go vegan, since vegan lifestyles are more efficient and are therefore responsible for far fewer plant-harvests. That said, the mistreatment of workers across all agriculture is a serious problem that needs to be solved by both legislation and consumer activism. All vegans should ensure that their produce is coming from ethical — and, when possible, local — origins, and support workers’ rights whenever it is time to vote.

However, while buying ethical fruits and vegetables is often easy, it is virtually impossible to buy meat that didn’t come from human exploitation. The work of killing animals is unavoidably traumatic: Imagine slitting hundreds of throats every hour, for eight hours a day. Imagine coming home every night to scrub the dried blood of a thousand animals off of your body. Is there any salary, any benefits package, that would render this job emotionally and physically endurable?

The incidence of PTSD, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, anxiety, paranoia, disintegration, and dissociation among slaughterhouse workers is comparable to that of combat veterans, executioners, and participants in genocide.

Some vegans view slaughterhouse workers as enemies; in truth, they are just another group of victims. One out of every four meat-packing employees is struck ill or injured every year. Compared to the national average, poultry workers are seven times more likely to develop carpal tunnel, five times more likely to endure workplace illnesses, and three times more likely to have a limb amputated. They are risking their lives for poverty-level wages: Sometimes, workers will accidentally kill themselves or each other during their shift. This should not be a surprise — after all, they are working with tools designed to kill animals, and humans are merely animals.

Their trauma isn’t just physical: The incidence of PTSD, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, anxiety, paranoia, disintegration, and dissociation among slaughterhouse workers is comparable to that of combat veterans, executioners, and participants in genocide. We cannot afford to feign ignorance and pretend that these psychological symptoms are any mystery. We cannot pretend to ourselves that there is no difference between harvesting vegetables and slaughtering animals. We must admit that while one of those jobs is potentially exploitative, the other is inherently exploitative.

You might have noticed that vegans usually don’t cite any of the arguments for veganism I have mentioned in this essay. Ask someone why they don’t consume animal products, and they’ll say they do it for the animals, their health, the environment, or some combination of these three motivators. These three arguments have become a plant-based trinity of sorts, while the humanist arguments I have made thus far tend to go completely ignored. But even these three common motivators — health, the environment, and the animals — have direct benefits for humans.

First, health: While veganism isn’t a diet, dietary changes are an enormous part of living a vegan lifestyle. A plant-based diet comes with numerous proven benefits, including a lower risk of heart disease, lower overall cancer rates, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, lower rates of hypertension, lower rates of type 2 diabetes, lower BMI, and — of course — a longer life expectancy (even when you control for other variables).

Now, switching to a plant-based diet for health might be narrowly imagined as a selfish act, benefiting you and arguably your loved ones. But if we look at this in the same context from another angle, convincing someone to go vegan becomes a gift. If you can persuade someone else to go vegan, you’ll likely improve their health and increase their lifespan. It’s like getting someone to quit smoking, in a hypothetical world where the tobacco industry is ruining antibiotic resistance and gestating future epidemics.

The environmental argument is the easiest of the three to see through a humanist lens. In damaging our planet, we set fire to our own house. Animal agriculture is setting many such fires: It is a leading cause of water contamination, water usage, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, air contamination, soil degradation, erosion, salinization, and deforestation. Most importantly, meat is widely accepted to be one of the primary causes of climate change, with the UN calling it “the world’s most urgent problem.” All credible sources predict that climate change will cause immeasurable human suffering, and some authors predict that it could cause our extinction. Humanity now faces the four horsemen of the omnivorous apocalypse: global starvation, antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic pandemics, and climate change.

Finally, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, even the argument for protecting animals can be seen in a humanitarian light. Intervening with those who are violent towards animals would work marvelously as a crime-reduction initiative. Studies on this topic have shown that a history of violence towards animals is present in 48% of rapists, 30% of child molesters, 25% of men incarcerated for violent crimes, and 43% of school shooters. Men who have been violent towards animals are five times more likely than others to be arrested for violence towards humans.

A rational society cannot possibly pay people to kill for a living and then expect them to be peaceful the moment they clock out of work.

Slaughterhouse employment increases the likelihood of violence to the point where simply having a slaughterhouse in your town is a liability: Even when you control for other factors, the presence of a slaughterhouse in your area increases the crime rate by 22%, with a 166% increase in the number of rapes, and a 90% increase in arrests for offenses against family members. A rational society cannot possibly pay people to kill for a living and then expect them to be peaceful the moment they clock out of work.

If we want to reduce human violence, we need to start rehabilitating those who are violent towards animals instead of reimbursing them. Violence towards animals is one of our best predictors of future violence towards humans. How can we claim to care about stopping human violence, if we prioritize the pointless continuation of violence towards animals?

Veganism is merely a partial acknowledgment of life’s most basic facts: None of us want to suffer, and provided we aren’t suffering tremendously, none of us want to die.

Adopting and advocating veganism helps fight all of the following problems facing humanity: world hunger, antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic diseases, indigenous land-theft, worker traumatization, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, human violence, environmental degradation, and climate change. Can anyone honestly say that bacon is more important than even one of these issues? Surely, if we care about humanity, if we care about solving these problems, veganism is the least we can do.

It’s understandable to assume that we are in a zero-sum conflict with the rest of the world’s animals. Unfortunately, this erroneous assumption can lead you to imagine that because veganism helps other creatures, it must be bad for humans. In truth, the promulgation of veganism leads to less suffering and longer lives, for ourselves, our species, and all of earth’s inhabitants. Veganism is merely a partial acknowledgment of life’s most basic facts: None of us want to suffer, and provided we aren’t suffering tremendously, none of us want to die. Though I think the most expansive, inclusive view of our circumstance is the most accurate, you need not care about the fate of other animals to go vegan. You can go vegan just for us.